Books, Works & Articles

“This biography is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to understand the extraordinary life and work of CLR James. It is thoroughly researched, based on primary sources as well as a very wide range of secondary materials, and is a careful, subtle reading of James’ prolific writings. It provides an accessible entry to the many worlds enriched by James: Marxist theory and practice, Caribbean and African politics, Western literature, popular culture, cricket and world revolution.” – Bridget Brereton, the University of the West Indies

“CLR James was one of the twentieth century’s most significant radical intellectuals. Kent Worcester’s excellent biography provides an extraordinary analysis of James’ creative mind and political imagination. Worcester ‘s work is the single best study of James currently available.” – Manning Marable, Columbia University

“Kent Worcester has managed to do something that very few people who write about political theory have done. He has provided an eminently readable biography but has also given James his full due as a political, social and literary theorist. This is a remarkable achievement.” – Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York Graduate Centre

CLR James: A Political Biography offers the first sustained account of the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most important radical intellectuals. CLR James (1901-1989) was born and raised in Trinidad and became one of the most prominent figures to emerge out of the West Indian diaspora. He authored numerous books and essays on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilisation, African politics, Hegelian philosophy and popular culture. His best known works, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, and Beyond a Boundary are classics of twentieth century thought. James played an active part in democratic movements in the West Indies and Africa as well as in left-wing and Pan-African campaigns in Britain, the United States and Trinidad.

“Kent Worcester’ puts the gist of James’s career before the reader in one compact, yet wide-ranging volume…. The narrative is swift, yet rich in information. An invaluable guide to the work of a thinker who posed questions about ‘postcoloniality’ well before his contemporaries realised that all empires must fall.” – Scott McLemee, editor, CLR James on the ‘Negro Question’

“This is a fine piece of work – a work which has been impatiently awaited for several years by serious James scholars.” – Paul Le Blanc, Carlow College

“Rather a shame that a biography of this man has to come from an American imprint instead of a British one. But if you can get hold of a copy it is worth a read: the story of a great man, the kind of communist who rumbled Stalin early on, wrote on cricket for the Manchester Guardian, was a standard-bearer both for West Indian independence and culture’s eternal verities: ‘a potent symbol of erudition and revolutionary determination,’ as Worcester puts it. ” – Guardian (UK) February 27, 1997

“C.L.R. James was always the avant-garde’s avant-garde, unknown to the many, adulated by the few. It used to be that to get your hands on anything more than James’s ‘The Black Jacobins’ you had to send away to a minuscule Marxist cell in Detroit and wait patiently for a few stapled pamphlets to arrive in the mail. Then he died — it was in 1989, a revolutionary year — and, in testimony to the strictly avant quality of his life and work, his moment duly arrived. Books by and about him have been pouring out ever since. In the last few months alone, we have had ‘C.L.R. James: A Political Biography’ by Kent Worcester (SUNY $19.95)…Kent Worcester’s biography [is] scrupulous…” – Paul Berman, The New Yorker July 29, 1996

“Kent Worcester for the most part succeeds in weaving the distinct strands of political, humanistic, and personal life into the portrait of a complex man who had a significant impact on virtually every debate he entered, from the polemical warfare of Marxist-Leninist factionalisms to his assessment of the importance of Herman Melville and Wilson Harris. ‘C.L.R. James: A Political Biography’ provides insight into James’s family life and the various political projects and positions he embraced while he lived in England and the United States after leaving Trinidad in 1932. It is a careful, thorough piece of scholarship, utilizing primary sources that had been neglected by other James scholars and interviews in addition to secondary literature. Though Worcester clearly admires his subject, he maintains a critical distance that enables him to dissect James’s evolution as a thinker and strategist.” – Michael Hanchard, The Nation May 27, 1996

“This biography is a highly readable introduction to James and his ideas. While no revisionist interpretation of James’s politics is offered here, readers will find in this biography a sympathetic account that relies extensively on James’s writings and on an expanding secondary literature. These sources are copiously documented, and readers will find an indispensable glossary of names and an annotated bibliography to assist their understanding of James’s life.” – Obika Grey, Contemporary Sociology May 1997

Buy the book here.